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This article will show you how to access a hidden diagnostic menu on your video iPod as well as run various tests on your iPod's hard drive, screen, and connection ports.

Steps

1

Reset your iPod. To do this, hold the center and menu buttons until you see the Apple logo.

2

Press and hold the center and rewind buttons before your iPod turns back on (when the Apple logo is still on the screen).

3

Listen to your iPod make a small sound through its internal speaker. You should see a plain white menu labeled "SRV Diag Boot" at the top. Any of your friends watching this process will be impressed over your technological prowess.

4

Press Menu to perform a manual test. You will see a new menu.

5

Explore your options at this point:

If you just want to return your iPod to normal, scroll to the bottom option labeled "Reset." This just resets your iPod like normal. All of your settings, songs, files, etc. will remain the same.

If you want to run some tests, click through the various menus. They are for the most part self-explanatory, and you can move through them just like the regular iPod menus.

Community Q&A

Tips

The menus can be a bit sluggish and non-responsive, so be patient if something takes a minute to load.

One particularly cool thing you can do is to go to the menu option labeled IO, then to "HardDrive," and then to "HDSpecs." Under this menu, you can see the actual temperature of your iPod's hard drive (in Celsius).

Warnings

The author of this article knows of no way to damage an iPod by running these test, but be careful anyway.

This has only been tested on all models of iPod. All models have a diagnostic mode accessed through different different key combinations.

Article Info

wikiHow is a “wiki,” similar to Wikipedia, which means that many of our articles are co-written by multiple authors. To create this article, 16 people, some anonymous, worked to edit and improve it over time. This article has also been viewed 42,817 times.